Word: bittner
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...haggard, hot-eyed Bittner, who speaks softly off the stump, heard 856 delegates, claiming to represent 78,000 workers, unanimously vote to strike all Armour plants if the big firm declines to negotiate with the C. I. O. Then he told reporters...
When Mr. Lewis called Organizer Bittner off steel and sent him into the almost wholly unorganized meat industry, there were no illusions in his huge, brooding head. He knew that the packing industry's labor policies are far from being as perishable as its products. Packinghouse workers have a non-union tradition. Since a big strike was crushed in 1886 in Chicago, only two major labor disturbances - one in 1904, one in 1921-have troubled the stockyards. Each was finally throttled. Workers are low-paid. Their wages rank 13th among the 15 major industries. But nearly all larger packers...
Laborites Lewis and Bittner moved slowly and thoroughly. They did not risk the splits and premature rough stuff that C. I. O. permitted to occur elsewhere. Chicago packinghouse labor lives "back of the yards" in a wide, dismal area of ramshackle homes and crumby tenements. Nearly all now belong to the C. I. O. Nearly all are devout Roman Catholics...
...Council, organized by Saul Alinsky, University of Chicago sociology graduate who for social research once lived with the Capone gang. The Council is sympathetic to C. I. O. Bishop Sheil has felt pressure from the packers and from A. F. of L., but last week he was on Van Bittner's platform large as life after the strike vote was taken. In fact, he read the invocation, then sat on the platform, one chair removed from Lewis, who key-noted the threatened strike. The good Bishop realized well that in actively applying a Papal Encyclical to a labor dispute...
...yards will be stopped by the packers when the strike comes, to starve public opinion as well as the workers into submission. But as a Catholic prelate Bishop Sheil also believed in the sacredness of property rights, the wickedness of violence. He earnestly meant John Lewis and Organizer Bittner as well as Armour & Co. when he prayed God's guidance for "those upon whose shoulders are laid such heavy responsibilities, fraught with such momentous consequences...